Snapshot

52

At four o’clock that Tuesday afternoon, Vyner wrote, Men are continents, men are islands, but I am a rocky shoal beneath the surface.

He’d just collected $500 from a woman in Glen Iris, the mother of an Army signaller who’d stepped on a mine on the Iraqi side of the border with Kuwait. Yep, a hero, great guy, single-handedly saved Vyner’s life on one occasion, but too modest to claim the credit. The mother’s eyes glistened, Vyner’s glistened. It was very moving, and while it lasted, Vyner believed every word of it.

It was getting hard to remember who he was, though. The personal, private, real Vyner was the Navy guy who’d refused the anthrax injection and been discharged for that and a few other minor matters, and later spent a couple of years in prison here and there. The pretend Vyner was the Army mate of some poor prick who’d died on foreign soil. The emerging Vyner was a hitman for hire-and a part-time conman.

That’s when another text message came in on his mobile phone. No congratulations for a job well done in wasting Tessa Kane last night, only an angry query, wanting to know why descriptions of Nathan Gent and the car had been released to the media. Xplain or no fee, the SMS concluded.

Christ. Vyner hadn’t read the paper closely this morning, but now he did. The front page was full of last night’s shooting, so he flicked through, and there it was on page 5, an accurate description of the car and a pretty accurate photofit image of Nathan Gent. His mouth dry, he sent back an SMS: Gent ded car torchd.

Who saw us? he wondered. There’s no description of me, so does that mean I wasn’t seen clearly, or do the cops have a description and this is some kind of trick?

He did a line of coke to chill out. He’d have to get himself another gun. He was fresh out of Browning pistols after last night.

That same afternoon, Scobie Sutton received a call from the lab. There were several usable prints on the bottles, cans and cellophane he’d collected from Andy Asche’s rubbish bin, and they matched one print not on the Toyota van itself but on the stolen goods recovered from it. That was good enough for Scobie.

‘You ever have a kid called Andy Asche in your home?’ he asked Challis.

‘No,’ said Challis, looking sad and distracted.

‘Then he’s definitely one of our burglars. He also owns cutting edge computer gear.’

Challis rubbed his face. ‘You think he copied my files and printed out the photos? Get a warrant for his computer and bring him in for questioning.’

Scobie shifted uncomfortably. ‘I think he’s done a runner.’

‘Look for him then,’ said Challis curtly.

‘Boss,’ Scobie said.

In his experience, you didn’t often catch crooks through detection and investigation but through chance or luck. Cops aren’t necessarily smart, he believed, but the bad guys are often dumb. You catch them red-handed, or they give themselves up, remain at the scene, punch a loved one who informs on them, find themselves arrested for a different crime, or draw attention to themselves by breaking the speed limit with a body in the boot, for example.

But now and then you got to detect, and Scobie went looking for Andy Asche on flight manifests. Assuming that Andy would not be flying under his real name, it was a process of elimination. First he rejected women’s and unlikely names like Aziz, Hernandez and Nguyen. Then he rejected reservations made some time ago (Andy had left in a hurry, leaving his wheels behind), return reservations, credit card purchases, Frequent Flyer purchases, and special requests (Scobie doubted that Andy was a vegetarian, and in too much of a hurry to request a special meal even if he was). Scobie also couldn’t see Andy trying to leave the country-unless he had a false passport, and that didn’t seem likely-or flying to a small regional airport. Andy would seek out a big place, a place where he could lose himself. Finally, Scobie concentrated on tickets booked and used recently.

He could feel the panic in Andy Asche. Maybe I’m a good cop some of the time, he thought, or good in some ways. And maybe that’s sufficient.

Andy was on the beach, working on his tan, blending in, another dropout or backpacker amongst thousands of them on the Gold Coast, where the sun never set. Except how many beach bums his age went on-line at the local library to read the Melbourne newspapers?

And how many had twelve thousand bucks in their pockets? Twelve grand, his total savings. He could maybe string that out for almost a year, but kiss goodbye to his dream of buying a BMW sports car.

The way everything had conspired against him. First, that cop, Scobie Sutton, asking if he was Natalie’s boyfriend, telling him she was missing. Missing? Andy seriously doubted that-old Nat was off somewhere getting coked out of her brain-but it unnerved him to have the cops sniffing around. Then, a day after sending out the blackmail demands, he’d been reading an old copy of the Progress in the shire canteen and there, on the front page, had been a photograph of a guy in one of the photos he’d found on the laptop. Robert McQuarrie. A cop’s son. A senior cop’s son. And, according to the story, grieving husband of a woman who’d been shot dead.

So anyone sending this guy a blackmail demand is going to find himself a murder suspect, right?

Time for the lad to make himself scarce.

It had been a low-speed rather than a high-speed escape. Andy had gone straight to High Street and cleaned out his savings account, all twelve thousand. He’d debated going home, but what if they were watching his pad? He stood on the footpath, trying to do a casual scan of High Street. Trouble was, everyone had looked like an undercover cop on stakeout.

So he hadn’t gone home. Instead, he went to the travel agent and bought a $99 Virgin Blue one-way flight to the Gold Coast. That was the high-speed part. Getting to the airport was strictly low-speed. He’d walked to the station, waited an hour for a Frankston train, got to Frankston, walked through the shops to the Nepean Highway, waited ninety minutes for the airport mini-bus, ridden the bus for another ninety minutes, then waited another two hours for his flight to leave. Wandered around the airport shops while he waited, almost bought a change of clothes, then told himself not to be stupid, nothing’s cheap at the airport. He’d go to a jeans and T-shirt place on the Gold Coast and get kitted out there.

He’d stay a week on the Gold Coast, and then head to somewhere north of Cairns. He could keep drifting north. It didn’t cost much to sleep on the beach.